Original report at SourceForge, opened Thu Dec 16 09:18:48 2010

Lists are not not supported by Axes3D.plot_surface although they are with 2D plots.

The following doesn't work with matplotlib 1.0.0:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D

x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
z = [3.09765624, 3.09923861, 3.07380428, 3.03930954, 3.01244428,
3.04109599, 3.06855951, 3.08104518, 3.01577574, 3.02221153,
3.06242075, 3.05325844, 3.03908932, 3.06565395, 3.07982723]

fig = plt.figure()
ax = Axes3D(fig)

plot once for the colors, once for the lines

ax.plot_surface(x, y, z, rstride=1, cstride=1)
ax.set_xlabel(u'X')
ax.set_ylabel(u'Y')
ax.set_zlabel(u'Z')
plt.show()

plt.close(fig)

If you try
plt.plot(x,y), it works.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\org.python.pydev.debug_1.6.3.2010100513\pysrc\pydevd.py", line 1145, in
debugger.run(setup['file'], None, None)
File "C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\org.python.pydev.debug_1.6.3.2010100513\pysrc\pydevd.py", line 916, in run
execfile(file, globals, locals) #execute the script
File "C:\Users\user\Workspace\general\bug_list.py", line 13, in
ax.plot_surface(x, y, z, rstride=1, cstride=1)
File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\mpl_toolkits\mplot3d\axes3d.py", line 663, in plot_surface
rows, cols = Z.shape
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'shape'

Axes3D.plot_wireframe also doesn't work, but Axes3D.plot works.